Media Composer First codecs and workflow

novice amateur editor here, trying to work on some YouTube videos. I have found the following:

If I record 1080p30 videos, then I can AMA link them in, and then transcode/consolidate to DNxHD90 or DNxHD145. 90 loses some quality, so I go with 145, and all is well. I then finish my edit, export to same source .mov and transcode to h.264 with Handbrake. All is well

I wanted to upgrade to 1080p60 as a "standard" on YouTube, but then I found that the choice of codec is DNxHD90 or DNxHD220. Nothing in between. I do not understand why.

Moving on though, DNxHD90 is again a loss in quality, so I started working with DNxHD220. I followed all the same steps, and exported same as source to a .mov container. Then I started having issues:

a) Handbrake cannot work with it to make it smaller. It doesn't "understand" it and believes the video is 1440x1080. I have to force it to a specific target resolution, but then the quality is degraded as it "thinks" it is 1440x1080 which is modified to 1920x1080 and the horizontal resolution is noticeably worse.

b) YouTube doesn't understand it either. Now, DNxHD220 is massive, so I did not upload the entire thing, just 5 minutes of it, but although it was uploaded, and started to be processed, it stuck at 95%. Opened a ticket with YouTube which had to admit that although it stated "full DNxHD compatibility" it cannot work with DNxHD220. Ultimately, this is pointless, as the 30 min videos I am producing would be prohibitively massive to upload.

c) FFAStrans also has issues with the video exported. For one, the auto-detection of the video again behaves like Handbrake, detecting 1440x1080. But this also has the added defect of thinking that audio is only right channel.

d) Exporting the timeline to h.264 is prohibitively expensive in time; a six-minute timeline needs 43 minutes to be exported to h.264 on my i7-4700K 32GB RAM Nvidia 980Ti.

Re: Media Composer First codecs and workflow

Under Windows, I use myFFmpeg to transcode DNxHD to the far more widely used ProRes 422 with 48kHz PCM audio. You also have the option of converting 44.1kHz audio to 48kHz audio while passing DNxHD video through myFFmpeg unchanged.

You can try 422 or 422HQ.

I hope myffmpeg will accept 60p 220.

Youtube loves prores even though it always tells you to use something more compressed.

Re: Media Composer First codecs and workflow

novice amateur editor here, trying to work on some YouTube videos. I have found the following:

If I record 1080p30 videos, then I can AMA link them in, and then transcode/consolidate to DNxHD90 or DNxHD145. 90 loses some quality, so I go with 145, and all is well.

It looks like in the original transcode that you're ending up with DNxHD 145TR instead of DNxHD 145. This is Thin Raster e.g. 1440x1080 with a PAR of 1.33 (which displays at 1920x1080). This was meant to be used for HDV material.

Just to verify, right-click on one of the transcoded clips and choose Get Info. See what it says for resolution and PAR.